Snapshots From Cannes

So far, my saving grace in Cannes has been a book. In a strange way, this film festival is about reading: multilingual subtitles, the industry dailies “great glossy gobs of print that arrive at your hotel fresh, like croissants, every morning” and endless PR. The paper drifts about like fake movie snow. Factor in the neurological overload from watching three or four films a day and pretty soon you begin to feel like a microchip. I found the slow lucidity of my book, Solo Faces by James Salter, a refuge. I sipped it like a drink. Drinks I don’t sip, although Cannes is one place where you can grow weary of champagne.

You do a lot of walking in Cannes, up and down La Croisette, between the hotel and the screenings at the Palais des Festivals. The walking is good—it feels almost normal, pushing through the glam hordes, every year more impossibly tanned, shod, sheathed, un-dressed, upwired, tattooed, and incredible looking, almost to the point of repulsion. But it’s the pencil-thin old dames that always get me—the two elderly Cannoises clinging to each other with canes, moving along the Rue d’Antibes, wearing wraparound Chanel shades with the logo in diamonds, in perfectly tailored jackets that sit on them like scarecrows because their bodies are disappearing. All the women in town, it sometimes seems, are already starring in their own movie. My favourite Cannes woman is the one-armed platinum blonde in the Jayne Mansfield sundress, who sells tickets to the gilded carousel on La Croisette.

Then there are the skin creams. The vast pyramids of anti-cellulite products in the French pharmacies, a world unto themselves with their ziggurat shrines to produits pour la peau. The fantasy of attainable beauty is parallel to celebrity worship here. Striving is in the air, like cigarette smoke in the bars.

Years ago at Cannes, the late Globe and Mail critic Jay Scott was walking along the Rue D’Antibes with publicist Maureen O’Donnell. “Cannes always makes me feel like a wallflower at a high-school dance,” said O’Donnell. “Yes,” said Scott, a festival veteran. “It always does. And it always will.”

So it was a good antidote to see a staged interview with American actress Gena Rowlands, now in her seventies, at the Actress Masterclass. Many young actresses, bold and burning with ambition, fought to get in the line to see the untamable star of 1970s classics like A Women Under the Influence, directed by her late husband, John Cassavetes. I lucked into a seat in the front row. Rowlands was also in Cannes because she wrote one of the eighteen beguiling love stories that make up the omnibus film Paris Je T’Aime, which screened here. Behind me was the young cast of the sexually graphic, seat-of-the-pants American movie Shortbus; they were there to hear anecdotes about Cassavetes, whose cinéma-vérité style clearly influenced their own film. The guys lolled about like puppies, kissing each other. A Cannes usher—the local equivalent of a US state trooper—had a firm word with my seatmate, who cradled a forbidden camera in his lap.

When press maestro Henri Béhar, in his usual black robes and silver cross, began to interview Rowlands, she looked unsure and glittery-eyed; she fastened her gaze on me, because I was closest. I smiled helpfully and maintained eye contact. It’s one of those little Cannes connections that would never happen anywhere else. Then she warmed up, as she talked about her husband’s improvisational style. “John wouldn’t let us talk about our characters with each other. He wanted it all to happen on film.”

What a dazzling spirit she is on stage, open but wily. She’s a broad-shouldered woman, dressed in black pants and white jacket, wearing many diamonds and smoky shades. That Rowlands head of floating blonde hair, champagne-coloured, her voice cigarette-flayed and drinkish. She seemed uncomfortable talking about herself and her past; she began acting in the theatre, had no interest in husbands, family, or film, but all that happened anyway. (“My master plan was so flawed,” she joked.) But Cassavetes, who began as a successful TV actor, just kept casting her and other members of their family in his films, which he sometimes edited in their garage. Gradually, she relinquished the theatre. “The thing about movies that is so fascinating is that you cannot think one thought without the audience knowing it. The audience knows almost more about you than you do yourself.”

Too bad Pedro Almodóvar never got to work with Gena Rowlands. I saw his new film, Volver, at an 8:30 a.m. screening, a preferred time slot because the world press has not yet become sweaty and redolent. Volver was popular with the critics and considered a front-runner to win the Palme d’Or, but in the end the jury, headed by In the Mood for Love director Wong Kar-Wai, awarded it to veteran UK filmmaker Ken Loach for his political portrait of Ireland in The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

I missed the Loach film, but I loved Volver, an abundantly warm story about a cast of women returning to family roots and buried family secrets. Almodóvar has also made Penélope Cruz into a very good facsimile of Sophia Loren, all curves and capability. She looks fabulous; no surprise there, but you can tell this is partly the result of the way Almodóvar dotes on her world- class cleavage, her neck, her eyes and lips. He makes women look absolutely scrumptious without diminishing or confining them—he liberates their beauty. When you look at the women in his films, young or old, and think about valiant Sharon Stone still having to cling to her crotch-flashing currency, you feel a bit sorry for Hollywood actresses. It has taken a gay male director from Spain to show us women of all ages who are warm, strong, passionate, funny, and carnal.

Compared to Almodóvar’s previous hit, Talk to Her, however, Volver meanders—or maybe that was me. The early-morning screenings are a good test of a movie’s power to transport a roomful of weary, semi-hungover journalists. This year over four thousand converged on this small town in southern France, all exuding subtle deadline panic. In fact, the only safe, relaxed place in Cannes is inside the darkness of a film that is beginning to work its magic. That is the comfort zone. Everywhere else is hustle and commerce.

After the film, I wandered through the shops, ogling the haute couture, buying the usual hundred-dollar brassiere. I succumbed to the shoe stores and bought a pair in woven orange leather. You begin to feel superficial and greedy here, so you might as well not fight it.

But Cannes wouldn’t be Cannes without the price tags and the bottom feeding. This is part of movie culture: filmmaking must marry hard cash and commercial constraints with artistic vision. And this year at Cannes, even though the festival was critically considered a mixed bag, there was abundant evidence that independent cinema is as robust as ever—regardless of what Hollywood does.

For me one discovery was Red Road. A first feature by Andrea Arnold, a forty-eight-year-old British director, this is an assured, suspenseful drama about a Glasgow woman who works for the city as a video surveillance operator. One day, her monitors catch the image of a couple making love in a field; the man turns out to be someone from her past, an ex-con who has clearly wreaked havoc in her life. First on her video monitors and then for real, she stalks him, confronts him, and moves through her desire for revenge to an ending that disarms our conceptions of gender, class, and forgiveness. Red Road also features an ambiguous scene of rough sex, something of a theme in movies at Cannes this year. I could never tell whether I was watching a rape or a consensual romp—an ambiguity David Cronenberg explored in the now-legendary staircase coupling of A History of Violence. The narrative use of video imagery in Red Road combined with the theme of voyeurism also evokes the cool aesthetic of Canadian director Atom Egoyan, except that this film represents a “female gaze” that seems to want to move beyond the isolation of the main characters. On the other hand, the film has one too many warm moments that involve a dog. But this film struck a new note.

On my last day, a mighty wind was blowing through the streets—alarming, almost like a film scene that presages catastrophe. When you walk out of the movie world and into weather like this, with the Mediterranean whipped up into whitecaps at noon, it can feel ominous. I slept in that morning, wearing an eye mask and earplugs with the doves hoo-hooting it out on the balcony. Overstimulation had set in. Watching three or four films a day, regardless of their content, is unavoidably aphrodisiac. It’s nothing personal; you’re just inflated by too many images and a steady diet of big-screen emotion. I think the loneliness of the critics at Cannes (a demographic that is overwhelmingly male) accounts for the fact that, by mid-festival, they tend to develop aesthetic crushes on otherwise indefensible actresses and movies.

Yesterday, I seat-banged my way out of two movies that didn’t hold, got turned away at the American Pavilion party, then stumbled into a reception at the Canadian Pavilion, where plates of reassuring cheese cubes were featured. That evening I saw Climates, a brilliant new film by the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. His previous film, Distant, won the Grand Prix at Cannes three years ago. Climates is a magisterially paced portrait of the subtle shifts of feeling and power between a couple (played by the director, and his wife, Ebru Ceylan) on the verge of breaking up. It is Turkish Bergman; very little happens, powerful emotions are in play, and it is riveting. There are long-held, unforgettable scenes of thick snow falling on Ebru’s face as it registers love, hate, longing, and regret all at once. Shot in a high-definition digital format that renders the micro-texture of every surface while conveying the luminosity of film, Ceylan’s unerring eye reminds us what cinema can and can’t do—and how few words are required if the actors, the images, and the situations are eloquent. In a field of films dominated by male directors, Climates also stands out for the honesty with which the director portrays his deeply flawed male hero, who wants his old girlfriend back—but only on his terms.

Ceylan brings intelligence and a droll wit to claustrophobic stories in which mountains, weather, landscape, and hotel rooms all have the strength and presence of characters. Almodóvar amplifies his stars, letting us see their humanity and beauty. Spending time with these two directors makes you feel good about the future of filmmaking.

My star moments at Cannes this year were rare, as usual. I never know what to say to movie stars. One year, at a beachfront party, I did have a few laughs with Ian McKellen, who was trolling the function for party boys. And last year I ran into Charlotte Rampling so many times, I began to wonder whether she was stalking me. This year, I found myself drawn not to the stars themselves, but to the spectacle of the world press spying on them. Cannes is, after all, about pictures, and stars: the flashbulb moment of consummation says it all.

I saw this in action my last morning in Cannes when I went to the Club, a press refuge tucked away on the fourth floor of the Palais. It has a terrace that overlooks the Mediterranean, which was once again whipped into a froth by the crazy wind. Luxury yachts crowded the bay. A tired journalist in black leather pants was sound asleep on the white leather banquette. I heard a strange soundtrack of urgent, wind-carried cries, as if from a boatload of people drowning. I looked over the terrace; the cries were coming up from a photo call taking place on the grounds below. These are held beneath a flapping white canopy, with hundreds of photographers standing in tiers, armed with giant telephoto lenses. Some of them bring portable stepladders. Handlers lead the stars to a chest-level blue prop, where they pirouette, front and back, as the photographers shout their names—Monica! MonicaMonicaMonica...regarde ici!...Nick over here, Press Internationale... NickNickNick, s’il vous plait...

On this particular day, I heard them calling the name of a new star: AvrilAvrilAvril! The formerly media-shy, punk-pop skater girl from Napanee, Ontario, was encountering, perhaps for the first time, this great wall of hungry cameras. She already seemed accustomed to this glassy gaze, unlike Gena Rowlands, playing to a certain face in the front row. I watched the fledgling actress pose this way and that, as the jittery fireworks of the flashbulbs went on and on. It was the recent-edition Avril Lavigne, with long platinum-blonde tresses and grown-up, glamorous maquillage. As she smiled and basked, she looked like a baby floating in a warm bath—a celebrity-in-progress, surrendering to the baptism that is Cannes.